If it seems like I've been extra grumpy lately, two weeks ago the hard drive in my laptop decided to completely, utterly fail without any prior warning.

Somehow, it knew that its trip to Oregon was over, its trip to Vancouver was over, all the vacation photos had been loaded on and deleted from the camera, and it was just about to go back upstairs and sit on its table, so now was the perfect time to just royally screw me, on a Sunday night in the 11PM hour. And so, it went kaput. It made the dreaded clicking noises, scraping the platters with the arm; it failed so physically and so completely that Drive Savers took one look at it and said "hahahahaha no."

That laptop was pretty much my only computer from May, 2005 to two weeks ago, so at the beginning I couldn't help but feel like three years and a couple months of my life just disappeared. Yes, there is great irony in the fact that I write product information for NetBackup and didn't keep any real backups of my laptop hard drive.

Over the past couple of weeks, though, things have seemed a bit better:

I bought a new laptop. Basically it's the same one I had, except it's two generations later, so it's an Intel, 4G of RAM instead of 2, bigger hard drive, iSight camera I'll never use, Leopard (has zillions of new features and no way to disable any of them) instead of Tiger, &c.

Almost all of my music was saved on external drives, because the laptop one was constantly near the full mark. The music that filled the hard drive to begin with all came from my PREVIOUS computer (which I haven't bothered to hook up, and am still trying to avoid it), but was also on my original 60G iPod - Senuti copied it back. I also had some recoverable stuff on my current nano.

The iPod also had copies of most of my photos, albeit at lower resolution. But I probably didn't need 2812x2116 pixel copies of me eating a pork rind as large as my head anyway (but it sure would have been nice to at least stick all that stuff on a thumb drive, as I was thinking about doing only hours before the crash)

My playlist information is a killer to lose, but most of the hard work was getting the tags right, so I can redo them again. (Again, just copying the iTunes library XML file somewhere could have saved me a world of hurt)

A few really important things I actually recovered from DVDs I'd given as gifts to friends. See, people? Music sharing works! You never know when you'll need to use them as your backup copy!

There WAS some music (a few EPs' worth) that I actually paid to download which was only on that laptop. That was severely annoying, and a reminder why I don't generally do that if I can avoid it. Luckily, and strangely, there were other versions of the same songs available through other means which were even higher-quality than the ones I bought. (Six Degrees needs to rethink what it's offering, I think.) It took me less than 24 hours to acquire those missing albums.

What else did I really lose? Zillions of board graphics. Of course, they're all here on the board, so is it really a loss? I've almost never gone back to a graphic after I've created it, so perhaps it's not a big deal after all.

Three years of chat logs gone - well, this IS a BIGGER deal, but I just don't chat like I used to, so I'm not losing a TON of fascinating things I could use against people years from now, I guess. Also, I tend to do a lot more face-to-face chat, and THEY don't get backed up anywhere either.

The most recent vacation photos were salvaged by using software to read the SD card in my camera to discover the "deleted" pix - I reconstructed all but about a half dozen of them (and even THOSE I have in lo-res from the nano. Strangely, it's mostly the ones I already made board graphics of, like the Superstore facade and the 7-Eleven sign.)

For an encore, I went to eBay and bought the cheapest, biggest Seagate I could cram into the old laptop ($55 + $10 shipping for a 160G 2.5" Ultra ATA/100, I know you were dying to know) and then installed Leopard on IT. This hosed its ability to work with wireless, but thankfully the 10.5.4 update (downloaded after I attached an Ethernet cable to the laptop and to the router) appears to have fixed it.

I also attached a "$200 at Costco" Terabyte external drive to the old laptop and now it's serving as a Time Machine, so I most definitely have backups of the NEW laptop.

The truth is, the old laptop needed to be replaced anyway - the screen was starting to show signs of "I'm gonna fail any day now" and I really thought THAT would be what went first. At least now, it can be remotely logged into and I can even use its screen on the new laptop should it ever die. Not that I'll ever need to, hopefully, but it can work just fine to host the backups, and it never has to move around again.

There's probably some software I need, but anything we bought I can reinstall from media, or borrow from Kim, or you know it's probably out there on the Internet even if we can't talk about it.

The truth is that for all the expense and power, the laptop is basically a machine for me to use to access the Internet - web servers and the box which hosts this board and some other stuff. I don't actually have really, really important stuff on the laptop, which is probably why I'd never given a second thought to backing it up somewhere else. Of course, you never expect the INTERNAL drive to be the one that craps out before the other ones.

So. I was very depressed for about 48 hours - mostly because I REALLY should have taken care of the really important stuff MONTHS ago and never did, which made me really mad at myself - but with a few weeks of hindsight I can say that except for the $2600 on the credit card, I'm probably a bit better off than I was.

I am tempted to take apart the old drive and salvage the magnet (magnets?), like I read about other kooky people doing, but for now I'm leaving well enough alone. There will be plenty of time later to disassemble worthless hardware (far, far away from the working stuff).

Y'know, does it seem to anyone else that Macs are disproportionately prone to hardware failures? I'm not trying to bash one side of the argument or the other, but I almost never hear of a PC failing quite that spectacularly, whereas pretty much everybody I know that has a Mac has some kind of story about the motherboard shooting off sparks, or the battery catching fire, or the sad Mac raping their cat, or something. Windows users, in my experience seem to get fed up with all the malware they've downloaded, and just buy a new PC to crud up.

"I could drown the pain, and drink upon commuter trains, and here you stand in eastern standard time" - Mike Doughty

Before the last failure, I have experienced a grand total of ONE hard drive failure, and that's from the old PowerBook, which I bought from my father and must have been close to 8 years old when it croaked. I've never had an external drive fail (knock on wood) - probably because I end up copying everything to two external drives anyway, and things only die when they're my sole copy.

Originally posted by Sec19Row53So how about a recommendation for home use for those of us lemmings who still do Windows?

Buy a Mac. ;-)

The BIG question, of course, is whether or not I'll put Windows XP on it. (Right now I'm not sure I even have a version that will work with Boot Camp.)

Originally posted by CRZThe BIG question, of course, is whether or not I'll put Windows XP on it. (Right now I'm not sure I even have a version that will work with Boot Camp.)

We just got a new Powerbook (is that what they're called still?) at my work for a user who is, in her own words, too special to use a Dell. It came with a Parallels install of XP on it. Parallels is pretty slick. Seems to be a more elegant solution than Bootcamp. Though when I switched to the windowless mode, the image of the Windows taskbar hovering over the dock just gave me a headache.

"I could drown the pain, and drink upon commuter trains, and here you stand in eastern standard time" - Mike Doughty

Originally posted by ironcladlouY'know, does it seem to anyone else that Macs are disproportionately prone to hardware failures?

No.

To back that up, I'm on my third Mac in eleven-plus years. I'm pretty sure I could fire up my old, original G3 if I felt like it, and I've still got my G4 and now my MacBook Pro going strong. We've gone through many more PCs than my batch of Macs over the years.

Holy fuck shit motherfucker shit. Read comics. Fuck shit shit fuck shit I sold out when I did my job. Fuck fuck fuck shit fuck. Sorry had to do it....

*snip*

Revenge of the Sith = one thumb up from me. Fuck shit. I want to tittie fuck your ass. -- The Guinness. to Cerebus